Inhaltsbereich

Reconsidering The Book of the Han

The Book of the Han (Hanshu) is the second major history in a series of altogether 24 similar books that were written in order to record the history of imperial China. While later histories were written by imperial commissions the first ones were products of private or at least semi-private endeavors. The contents of the first three or four of these histories belonged to the essential knowledge that any scholar or civil servant in imperial China was expected to have acquired. Even today parts of them are taught at school in China. Yet, in the West they remain largely unknown. Although some work has been done in recent years on the first history, the Records of the Historian Sima Qian, research on Ban Gu, the author of the Book of the Han, remains scarce. It is the aim of this workshop, therefore, to stimulate research into this important topic.